"I find the headiness of the acrid,
almost urinary scent unbearable,..."
More Perihelion:
Bob Sward's Writer's Friendship Series
A quick list to poets featured in this issue:
Vernal
Silent and gestural, these mottled lilies
knife open to intricacy in a motion
abruptly similar to your own:
like lovers, through long nearness
you’ve come to resemble one another.
It’s visible in each bloom’s
freckling, like the cream-froth
complexion grading your shoulders.
Or the veins mazing the translucent fabric
of these petals and of your eyelids.
Still, what to compare to the porcelain-tipped
pistil’s eagerness, trembling forward
in its pelvic-thrust approximation of sexuality?
(For the flower, no parody, pollination
being the erotic of the floral) --
I find the headiness of the acrid,
almost urinary scent unbearable,
a cue for love and for decay in one,
becoming stronger as blossoms wilt
and colors brighten to brittleness.
Which leads me to consider the way
I have been marked. I enter rooms
with stained fingers or jaundiced face,
the saffron of each stamen undusted
bald as velvet upholstery, years-worn.
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